CAPACITY PLANNING TO INCREASE MECHANIC AVAILABILITY IN AFTER-SALES SERVICE AT PT. ELANG

• Main Author: Rahmah, Mawaddatur
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Subjects: Manajemen umum
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/81656
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

After-sales service is critical in selling products such as heavy equipment, which require maintenance from mechanics who understand the product. PT. Elang, one of Indonesia's heavy equipment distributors, provides service support after purchase. The company currently struggles to manage the mechanics for repair requests from customers. Most of the time, the mechanics are already dispatched for regular maintenance, so repair requests are challenging to respond quickly to because of the unpredictable nature of the case. On the other hand, the unit cannot be used while waiting, hampering the customers’ operation. Complaints and bad reviews on after-sales service lead to lost customers and significant revenue loss. This operational issue is related to capacity. Therefore, this study is limited and focused on capacity planning for mechanics in Indonesia's service support division of a heavy equipment distributor company. This study aims to identify the gap between current and ideal capacity, look for the root causes through the business process review to find where improvement is needed and propose a suitable capacity planning solution for the company. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this study. The qualitative method was through interviews and discussions with the head of service support and the branch operation head to understand the situation and process. The business process related to the issue was then analysed with Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) and the root cause was found with the Current Reality Tree (CRT) method. The quantitative method was through the sales and capacity data collected from the company. This data is analysed to determine capacity utilisation. The best alternative capacity solution was selected using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) using XLSTAT and compared to manual Excel calculation. This study showed that some branches have insufficient capacity to fulfil the after-sales service demands. Those branches must utilise the capacity beyond what is available, leading to a negative capacity cushion. The issue happened because of two root causes: an inadequate number of mechanics and an insufficient integrated system to support the information flow through related divisions. Three alternative solutions were proposed based on the root causes. Alternative solutions include providing service points, outsourcing mechanics, and implementing a cloud ERP system. The criteria used to evaluate the solutions are cost, effectiveness, sustainability, ease of implementation, and scalability. After the AHP calculation and analysis confirmed the result with the head of service support, it concluded that the solution that could be implemented in the company is providing service points with the priorities, resulting in 71.03%. The next alternative is to implement the cloud ERP system, with a result of 15.04% and outsource mechanics with 13.93%. With this solution, the company considered a long-term approach with more sustainability and scalability criteria than ease of implementation. The criteria priorities are cost, effectiveness, sustainability, scalability, and ease of implementation, with consecutive results of 47.87%, 24.3%, 12.64%, 6.6%, and 8.59%. This study also proposes an implementation plan for providing service points. This study contributes to solving the problem of mechanic unavailability and increasing response time in Indonesia's heavy equipment distributor company.